About the actual content
Read the question and underline the terms you believe are crucial (maybe 3-5) and define them. Make an outline for how to respond to the question(s).
- The purpose of the outline is to delimit your essay and to concentrate it around a few specific claims.
- Your essay cannot cover everything you know.
- What you choose to concentrate on needs a motivation.
A good essay may have the shape of a champagne glass:
- A broad introduction that is narrowed down to motivate your specific claims and your approach to analyze them.
- The analysis should be self-contained. Imagine a reader who has not attended the course but who is quite smart. Hence the reader needs to get all terms defined, assumptions made clear and the mechanisms explained, but not in a pedantic manner. Be explicit about how your analysis is relevant for the question.
- End by summing up and make sure that your main answers are clear.
Some final advice.
- When you read through your paper, almost every paragraph should build or question the argument you are trying to make. Otherwise it’s an indication that the paper is running astray.
- Make sure that you answer the question. Be specific when you check the paper: Where did I answer the questions?
- When you use a formal model use it explicitly. If you just mention some alternative approach, you don’t have to formalize it.
- Focus on the aspects of the model that are relevant for the questions that you answer.
- Your outline is a guide. You may revise the outline as you work with the paper.
About formatting
Write your document with 1.5 line spacing, 12 point, in some readable font (for instance Times, just not something like Courier or Arial). All in all, you should end up with about 7,500–10,000 characters (including spaces), i.e. 3–4 pages of text + potential graphs, equations etc. No more than 1 extra page for equations, graphs, etc!
About references
You should always cite when you use an argument, an example or a theory from an article, newspaper and so on. References should be included at the end of the document, formatted something like this:
A. B. Atkinson, Lee Rainwater, and Timothy M. Smeeding (1995). Income distribution in OECD countries : evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study. OECD Publications and Information Center, Paris. ISBN 926414577.
Michael Baker (2011). Innis lecture: Universal early childhood interventions: what is the evidence base? Canadian Journal of Economics, 44(4):1069–1105.
Lynn A. Karoly, M. Rebecca Kilburn, and Jill S. Cannon (2005). Early Childhood Interventions: Proven Results, Future Promise. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA.